Tom Hiddleston: ‘We’ve been braver for The Night Manager season 2 – we had to be’

It’s been 10 long years since the gripping BBC thriller The Night Manager premiered, introducing viewers to Tom Hiddleston’s sleuthing Jonathan Pine for the first time.

I remember watching season 1 so vividly, enthralled by the world that author David Cornwell – known by his pen name John le Carré – had created in his 1993 novel of the same name.

So when I heard that the acclaimed series was coming back for season 2 a decade later, I could barely contain my excitement. While we still wait to find out who the next James Bond is, I’m in desperate need of some cold, hard espionage.

Metro recently attended the red carpet premiere in London, where we spoke to some of the brilliant creative minds behind The Night Manager, including lead actor Hiddleston and Simon Cornwell, the son of the late le Carré, who gave his blessing for a second season before his death.

Playing Pine, a former British soldier-turned-hotel night manager, marked a pivotal point in Hiddleston’s career. It was the performance that made many people consider him as a serious contender for 007. But the whole point of Pine is that he tries his best to lurk in the shadows, rather than be flashy and stand out.

‘I told everyone involved, David Farr, our screenwriter, our producers, our director… I said, it’s 10 years later. I’m 10 years older. A few more scars on the inside. A few more scars on the outside. Let’s lean into it. Let’s embrace it,’ Hiddleston told us, when explaining how both he and Pine have evolved since season one.

‘It felt really fascinating, because the last 10 years in the world have been incredibly complex for all of us. I can only imagine if you’re a field agent in security and intelligence services, that the last 10 years have been quite the rollercoaster.’

The 44-year-old continued: ‘I know we’ve been braver. I sort of had it tattooed onto the inside of my brain that we had to be harder, better, faster, stronger, to steal from Daft Punk.

‘We had to be braver and deeper, and had to try to be both more courageous and more compelling and also more intense and more vulnerable, to try and excavate the centre of who Jonathan Pine is at a deeper level.’

In season one, Pine is recruited by Angela Burr (Olivia Colman) to work on the inside to bring down the notorious arms dealer Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie).

Season two reintroduces Pine under a new alias, Alex Goodwin, an MI6 agent working for an inconspicuous surveillance department. Despite his low-key job, the protagonist finds himself embroiled in the operations of Colombian arms dealer Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva) and businesswoman Roxana Bolaños (Camila Morrone).

Hiddleston emphasised that Pine ‘has quite extraordinary courage and moral clarity’. ‘He wants to defend what’s good in the world, what’s good about our country and what it stands for. If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything,’ he stressed.

In 2020, le Carré died at the age of 89. Before his death, Hiddleston had the opportunity to get to know him personally.

‘We were so blessed that before John le Carré died, he had given his sons, who are our producers, the blessing and the affirmation that we should try to go again and to be brave about it, and to take risks and to trust our instincts,’ Hiddleston shared.

‘After the first series aired, I got to know John le Carré quite well, and we used to see each other when I was walking my dog, my very young puppy, at the time. He would be doing his morning constitution, and I would get these takes of what’s happening in the world fresh from the horse’s mouth, as it were.

‘He had me over for dinner, and I got to know the sense of his background. You’ve probably heard me say this, he said a very generous thing early on. I asked him if there was anything I needed to know about playing Pine. He said, “Tom, you’ll have guessed by now, Jonathan Pine is me, and now he must be you.”’

While the second season of The Night Manager goes beyond the book, it still incorporates elements of the novel, given that it was actually set in Colombia, and this setting was changed to the Middle East for the first season of the TV adaptation.

Cornwell, le Carré’s son, who’s an executive producer on the series, outlined to Metro how the second season takes the story to ‘new exciting places’.

‘The challenge we had putting together the new season – and that David Farr, the writer, had – was to find a new story that felt like it came from how my dad would see the world today if he were here to see it and and to bring the same kind of energy, the same questioning, the same sense that nothing is is quite as it is presented to be, and all of that rich ambiguity and depth of character.’

Cornwell outlined how there had been talk of a second season while his father was alive, but ‘great stories don’t come easily’.

‘We didn’t want to do something that we didn’t feel was going to be better and richer than the first season. We needed the magic to happen again. You can’t control the timing of that, and it took David Farr having an extraordinary idea, a great brainwave, for him to get to grips with the new season. Once he did, we went as fast as we could, and it still took us three and a half or four years to get the show made.’

He added that the ‘extraordinary’ Hiddleston is the ‘embodiment of Jonathan Pine’, adding: ‘In some ways, I think it’s his most perfect role.’

Writer Farr explained that when le Carré first gave his blessing for a second season, he didn’t have any ideas yet for what it could be about.

‘I knew that it wasn’t the kind of show you could just bash out a second season. It wasn’t made like that. So we just waited. And then I had an idea one day, very specific,’ he recalled.

‘I had an image in my head of a car coming to a monastery in the hills in Colombia, which you’ll see in the show. In there is a mystery, and out of the mystery came the story. From then, of course, you start to explore what’s Jonathan Pine like now, all these years later. You think about time and ageing, so then character themes come. But for me, stories always come, often with one image, often that you have in the night.’

The Night Manager season 2 premieres on New Year’s Day on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.

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